Days 15 & 16 Winton Now with pictures although it was t easy!

This post was kindly illustrated with thanks from Longreach free internet

Despite having free internet here in Winton our room is in a bit of a black hole and our reception has been non existent. Also haven't had any phone reception for the best part of two days, sorry if you have been trying to contact me!
So today I'm trying to fit in two posts at once (also yesterday was a long day of relatively uninteresting driving). (I am still trying to get this up! It's now the next morning and still pics are not loading quick enough!)
We left Mt Isa (which was a place we really liked pretty much until we had a good look at it Wednesday morning). It was nice and very friendly but the mine stacks in the middle of town are quite a wake up call. Smoke billows into the sky and part of you shakes your head about the dreadful impact that is being made on the environment and then you also acknowledge that being a mining town that is the backbone of the community.

From the lookout at Mt Isa

So we headed off for our 450 or so km trip, which compared to previous day's was relatively easy! These km were probably the most uneventful and tiring km we have travelled, thankfully we are still enjoying our audiobooks which makes the travelling much more enjoyable. There were no real roadhouses on this distance. Although there were two pub stops that we should have made , one being the Crocodile Dundee and the other the Blue Healer, hindsight you are a wonderful thing!

My Wilkie warrior who plucked this wildlife from the radiator eat our lunch stop, no wings! They were extracted separately. At least it would be an easy feed for a bird

Some road views

More road

At one of our many wee stops, we bought Lewis a 2L water pack, it his mission to consume it asap, which means many stops!

Crocodile Dundee Pub

Our lunch was at a rest stop that we finally found, it was very windy and lots of flies so not one of our best days. The trip was slow going but we finally made it to Winton.
In the afternoon we headed out to the Music Fence and had a great chance to 'bang out ' the I've been
in the car all day crazies.

A Sunset pic!

Again a great room for accomodation at the Boulder Opal Motel who apparently have Parma night on Wednesday(even the ladies at the Info centre recommended it!). So off we went for parmigiana and just as well we only bought two for the four of us!!!! We still had leftovers, enough for lunch wraps today, best thing is that it was yummy too?

Thursday
We headed it to Lark Quarry this morning to view the Dinosaur Stampede, it was pretty awesome, over 3000 dinosaur tracks on the ground in front of you. They have done a great job at the centre. The drive out is 120 km and studded with lots of dirt road. We saw kangaroos, goannas and lots of birds on this drive.

On the road out

Amazing museum

One happy camper!

Footsteps many millions of years old

The critters you meet!

Back to our room for lunch then off to The Australian Age of the Dinosaurs to see some of the dinosaurs they have uncovered around the Winton area. Only 23 km to this one and only 11 of that on dirt. We also saw an emu this afternoon. They are only doing digs for three weeks a year as they have too many bones to work with already.

We managed to earn serious brownie points with one little boy today who was extremely excited. They have volunteers work on the bones from 12 years of age so guess what he wants to do in 5 years? And when he is 12 he can attend a dig, also on his current bucket list!!

We came back and had a stroll around town this afternoon.
An early night tonight.